The Fugue

If I gave you a copy of my no-knead bread recipe, throw it away and download it again. I made a mistake in calculating the amount of start needed for the sourdough variation. The 3 tablespoons I told you to use is too much for a 12–18 hour ferment. You'll often end up with "raggy" dough that won't keep its skin or rise properly. Basically, the effect would be the same as using too much yeast, though I think the sourdough culture byproducts might be harsher to the gluten than just yeast.

The effect is more pronounced with whole wheat, which has a higher ash content which means it can absorb more of the sourdough byproduct (lactic acid among other things) before the ph reaches the level that inhibits sourdough growth. This is why whole wheat sourdough is generally more sour, all other things equal.

The correct amount of start for that recipe is about 1 tablespoon of start. This is roughly 2% of the whole weight.

By the same token, if your room temperature is closer to 90° than 70°, as mine is during the summer, you might find that you need to reduce the fermentation time considerably or your dough will go to rags. This is because yeast (and sourdough culture) grow much faster in the mid 80s than in the 70s. I've talked about this before, with a pretty graph.

As a bread fanatic, I've often dreamed of having my own brick oven. At first I thought it was a complicated and expensive endeavor, and that I couldn't build one because I'm renting. But then I got creative and designed a couple Brick Ovens for the Cheapskate, and I think that I can build a great oven for about $65, which is portable enough to appease the landlord.

Made some delicious pizza tonight. As much for my benefit as yours I'm posting the recipe, since I always forget how much dough to make to feed n people.

Pier 42 Pizza
-------------
Serves 4 (two pies)
As hot as your oven goes

340  g   flour
230  g   water
1.33 tsp salt
30   g   active sourdough start
         olive oil
         sauce
         toppings

Mix and let set 8-18 hours. Longer would be even better, but you'll want to do
it in the fridge (take it out a couple of hours before). If you're in a hurry,
add 1 tsp yeast and let set 3-4 hours. If you're really in a hurry, get 
Papa Murphy's.

Divide dough in two and stretch one half into your favorite pizza shape. Get
your toppings ready, then spread some olive oil over the crust, then spread
some sauce on top of that. Add cheese and toppings (or toppings and cheese),
and place in the preheated oven, preferably on a preheated pizza stone but a
cookie sheet would be ok too. Bake until the crust and cheese are golden brown
and delicious (5-15 minutes).

I didn't make the sauce for tonight's pizza, and frequently we just open a can of tomato sauce and spread that on and then sprinkle oregano, basil, and salt on top. But for completeness I'll give you the sauce recipe as it was told to me (and as far as I remember it correctly):

Sauté some garlic in some olive oil. Add a can of (mostly) drained diced or
crushed tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Salt to taste. Cover with sprinkled
basil, then add oregano and perhaps some thyme. Fresh is best of course, but
you can use dried. Simmer until you declare it done. Or don't simmer it at
all, someone told me that was the purist way.

If you're interested in going all Mario on us, jump on over to Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe. There's a lot to read and ponder there, and though I don't agree with everything on the whole it's a great starting place. You certainly can't deny that he has some delicious-looking pizza!

So as not to leave anyone hanging from my last post, here's what I do from beginning to end with regards to calculations when baking sourdough bread.

First, I decide on quantity. I bake a loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread every week or so (sometimes sourdough, sometimes no), and 800g is a good dough weight for that. For a sourdough boule, I aim between 300g and 500g. For experiments and baguettes, 250g or less. For big boules or loaves to fit the more normal size loaf pan, to take to functions for example, I aim at 1kg. The beauty of it all is that I can make whatever amount of bread fits my needs, with a few minor calculations.

Now that we have the dough weight, we need to break it down into the various ingredients. Most ingredients in baking are relative to the flour used, so flour is the first calculation. I divide the total weight by one plus the hydration baker's percentage, i.e. if I want a 66% hydration dough I do flour = dough / 1.66.

Next we need the amount of water. water = flour * hydration. For our 66% hydration bread that's water = flour * 0.66. 66% hydration is a really nice number because not only does it make good bread, it has a good margin of tolerance for measuring mistakes (you can go a little drier or wetter with no worry), and it is easy to do in your head. That's right, 66% is two thirds. 300g flour and 200g water makes 500g dough and it's easy to remember/calculate even without a calculator.

All that's left is the salt and leavening. Salt is about 2% of the flour. I read 1.8% somewhere and it stuck so that's what I use, though I know my measuring is nowhere near that accurate for the amount of dough I make. So 300g * 0.018 = 5.4g. Alas my scale measures 5g increments which is mostly useless for measuring salt, so I asked units what to do:

You have: 1 g
You want: tsp salt
        * 0.16666667
        / 6

Oh, well that's easy to remember, just divide the salt weight by 6. So salt = flour * 0.018/6 teaspoons.

With yeast you just guess. Take a similarly sized recipe and use that much. Bread recipes all vary so much here anyway, and the different kinds of yeast do too. Just remember, more yeast means faster rise and less desirable flavor. Less yeast means slower rise and better flavor.

If you're doing sourdough, I hope you haven't mixed the flour and water yet because there's going to be some adjustment. Decide how much start you want in proportion to your dough. 10% or 20% is easy to do in your head. Now do the same thing with flour and water as above, for your total start amount. Or, be lazy and use 100% hydration start and divide by two (by weight). e.g. for our 500g loaf with 20% inoculation we want 100g start, so that's 50g flour and 50g water (plus a little start from the fridge, about 10g will stick to the side of your container anyway). Subtract the resulting flour and water amounts from the calculated flour and water above (or do the start calculations first).

If you want to add honey, sugar, oil, butter, seeds, whatever else, just follow what a similar-sized recipe calls for or eyeball it. Really the only things to fret here are the flour/water ratio and the flour/salt ratio.

All that probably seems a little overwhelming, which is why my sourdough script and sourdough calculator webpage exist. But if you're lazy/cheap and can memorize a few unchanging equations (but can't memorize a recipe for 5 minutes to save your life), that's how you do it.

We had a little blind taste test here at the southern Fugal base. We compared two baguettes which differed only in the sourdough start used.

The Contestants

Brian Mailman of San Francisco graciously sent me a SF start. I refreshed it twice, baked with it twice, and declared it ready for the taste test.

My start was created earlier this summer from some King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour and water. This start developed very quickly and was made a voluminous loaf after only 36 hours, and it is indistinguishable from my old start, so I think it's likely that they are basically the same culture. Despite the fact that the last time I had used the start was several months before and I started from scratch. So this start is either New Mexican, King Arthurian, or Polish depending on your point of view. (My old start came from a baker in Albuquerque who claims its ancient origin to be Poland)

Methods

When the SF start came I boiled my tools and proceeded to refresh and bake with it. I was careful not to contaminate it with the Polish start.

To prepare these two loaves, I refreshed 25g of each start to 60g, in different vessels and on different counters. Then when they were nice and active I mixed 400g of dough, including salt, until the gluten development was good. It was drier than I like because adding 100g of 100% start would soften it up, but it was all precalculated to give a final hydration of 64%.

I divided the dough into 195 grams each (lost a few grams to the process), then mixed in 50g of the respective starts, again being careful not to cross-contaminate. For some reason the polish dough was a bit wetter, so I ended up adding a tad of flour to it until the consistency felt the same.

I shaped into baguettes and let rise until they were ready to bake. I baked at 450 for 10 minutes then 400 for 5 more minutes, with a little steam (but no cloche) at the beginning.

Results

Both breads tasted good, but neither seemed to taste substantially different from the other. This jives with my earlier observations that the SF start didn't seem to taste any different, although it does smell a little bit different.

Just to be sure we conducted a blind taste test. My wife said the SF one tasted ever so slightly more sour, but that they tasted mostly the same. I said that the Polish one had a more complex almost-sour undertone, but basically the same. Neither one was noticeably sour, which I'm sure had to do with the technique as both of these starts have produced mildly sour bread before with the same ingredients.

The most significant difference was in looks, as you can see at Flickr. Look at the crust comparison but don't jump to conclusions - the difference is easily explained by the position in the oven and my shaping (mis)technique. Look at the crumb comparison, though. There was more rise and spring in the Polish baguette, and the resulting crumb is more desirable. However I can't completely discount the possibility that it remained slightly more wet than the SF dough, which could account for it. Or perhaps it was temperature-induced, or the SF start finished rising sooner and was slightly overproofed. There's just not enough data to tell, really.

One thing is clear, there is no major difference in the two baguettes, although there is a very slight difference in taste. Far more important to love the start you're with than to chase after that perfect start. Nevertheless, for your benefit I've asked for a sample of ACME start, and will get a sample of the authentic Polish start from my dad and will repeat the experiment and see if either of those tastes significantly different from my old standby.

My wife is out of town, which means you can bet your britches I'm eating all the stuff she doesn't like this weekend. You know, like sauerkraut, corned beef, swiss cheese, rye bread. Hey, those are the basic building blocks of one of the most delicious sandwiches ever invented: The Reuben.

This post isn't about the Reuben. It's about the rye bread I used to make the Reuben. It turned out very well. Here's the recipe I used, which I adapted from somebody's New York Style Jewish Rye recipe:

300g 100% start
560ml water (2 1/3 cups)
1 T sugar
2 c light rye flour
2 T kosher salt
2 T caraway seeds
4.75 c flour

I didn't want three bâtards though, so I thirded the recipe. I mixed the dough for a few minutes in the mixer. I had to add some flour, but the dough was still plenty wet. Oh, and sugar is boring and my honey was crystallized so I used molasses instead. I stuck it in the fridge for five or so hours and took it out just before going to bed. When I woke up I preheated the oven at 400 for 20 minutes then baked under cloche for 10 minutes, then without cloche to an internal temperature of 200 F.

It's delicious, but next time I'll use just a tad less salt and caraway. Incidentally, caraway is the taste you probably associate with rye bread, not the rye itself. There was no oven spring to speak of, I think because it was just barely overproofed, in spite of starting the proof cold. I guess I'll just have to sleep less or proof during the day.

I ported my calculator to javascript and an HTML form, which you can find at http://hans.fugal.net/sourdough/calculator.html. Happy baking!

My sourdough calculator had a major bug in the calculations. If you followed its instructions you got much higher hydration than you asked for. e.g. if you asked for 68% hydration at 20% starter inoculation, you got a dough that was 74% hydration. Oops. It's been fixed and can be downloaded at the same place. Other changes include different defaults (500g 68% hydration loaf with 20% start) and volume measurements for the scale-deprived.

This is a success story. In reality it begins long ago and far away when I began tinkering with bread baking. But it's not the culmination of all bread baking, or even of all my bread baking. It's just good. Everything came together and I will now proceed to tell you how it happened, and how my bread compares to grapestart lady and grill boy (in my perhaps-biased opinion).

It started with a book: The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens. I picked this book up from my university library a couple of weeks ago with the intention of perhaps building a little masonry oven in my backyard. I'd heard that the bread baked therein is exsquisite and beautiful. This book is amazing. It not only tells you how to make a masonry oven, but it tells you how to bake naturally-leavened (sourdough) bread, and it does an excellent job of both. This is Good Reads.

To make a long story short, I learned from the book that I didn't want to build a masonry oven while renting (I do when I buy/build a home), and that I could get nearly identical results with La Cloche, or an imitation thereof. My wife sells Pampered Chef so we got their 9x13 stoneware casserole dish vaulted lid, but you could do with a terra cotta pot. Welding gloves come in handy too.

The loaf development went like this:

• Thursday morning I took 10g 100% hydration active sourdough start and refreshed it with 30g flour and 30g water.
• Thursday evening I mixed up the dough, let it rest for a few minutes, kneaded it, let it rest for an hour, then put it in the fridge overnight.
• Friday morning I took the dough out, let it warm up for an hour (it's hard to handle with bare hands when it's that cold), then formed it into a baguette shape. I put it on the counter under my plastic "greenhouse" to keep up the humidity and let it rise while I was at school (about 8 hours total).
• When I got home I turned the oven to 450 F, with the "cloche" and tiles inside, and let it preheat for 20 minutes. During this time I slashed the loaf and got it onto the peel (that was an ordeal because I forgot to use parchment paper, but it wasn't the end of the world).
• Baked for 35 minutes. (until my probe thermometer hit 95 C which is a good internal temp at my altitude)

The crumb is very nice, as you can see, which I attribute to not overkneading and using a fairly wet dough (about 73% hydration).

The crust was pretty, but not as dark as I'd hoped for (related to the fact that it took too long for an itsy baguette to bake). I think I need to either turn the oven up higher or preheat longer, or both.

This is the recipe I used:

70g     100% hydration active start
170g    all-purpose flour
115g    water
1/2 tsp salt

Well, that's the recipe I should have used, but I miscalculated the salt and had too much salt. Still good but a bit too salty. Yes, this is a little baguette. It's my experimental baking size.

How does my little baguette compare to grapestart lady and grill boy? My baguette wasn't as thin and long as Nancy's, but her crust was tougher and mine was crispy and chewy and tasty without being a workout. My crumb wasn't as delightfully labyrinthine as grill boy's, but still interesting and of good quality. The taste (aside from too much salt) was almost identical to what I remember of the grapestart baguette, which I consumed only a week ago. My start is home-grown here in Las Cruces a month or two ago, perhaps influenced by bacteria that still lingered in my kitchen from the old Polish start that I killed off, but not from San Francisco in any case. So there you have it, the story of my baguette.

I was in the LA area for Von's wedding, and dragged my family across Hollywood to get some "San Fransisco Sourdough" bread from Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery. (Nancy shall hereafter be referred to as the grapestart lady.) It was good stuff. The crust was everything you dream of in an artisan crust and the crumb was delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to go there was because the La Brea Bakery won some SF Sourdough contest one year, beating out Acme baking company. This is interesting as La Brea is in LA, not SF. (Take that you stuck up San Fransiscans) I wanted to see what "San Francisco Sourdough" really was, for two reasons: to see if it's worth the hype and to see if the sourdough bread I bake is similar or not. Now that I've tasted it, I can say that it's not worth the hype, precisely because it tastes just like my sourdough bread. My sourdough bread is made from a sourdough start that supposedly came from Poland back in the day but mostly lived in New Mexico then Utah and again in New Mexico. When I get it right, it's good and tastes just like grapestart lady's bread (except for the crust - more on that later). But it's not something magical that can only be reproduced in California.

The big difference between grapestart lady's bread and mine is that hers has that nice artisan crust and mine doesn't. I'm doing some experiments with crust later this week, so keep your eyes open.

Now, on the way home (sort of), we're in Las Vegas. At Redbeard's recommendation we had lunch at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. (Bobby Flay will hereafter be referred to as grill boy.) They brought us some bread: some "Italian Ciabatta", some cornbread muffin things, and some sesame whole wheat cranberry stuff. It was all excellent, but the ciabatta was beyond excellent. It was, in fact, far beyond the sourdough baguette from La Brea. It had a nice open crumb (grapestart lady's was fairly uniform and boring), and its artisan crust was still crispy and chewy, but not as much work to just eat as grapestart lady's. It wasn't purporting to be sourdough, but it was obvious to me that it was naturally leavened and had all kinds of delicious tastes including sourdough. I was very impressed. The burger was ok, too.

So we can learn a few lessons here. Maybe La Brea had a bad day or Mesa Grill had a good day, or maybe it had to do with the difference between ciabatta and baguette. But it's clear that you needn't believe the hype, that California is not inherently superior, and that grill boy rivals grapestart lady in making bread. Who would have guessed?